


tunnel vision

by romancandles



Category: The Get Down (TV)
Genre: M/M, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-29 23:52:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10864716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romancandles/pseuds/romancandles
Summary: “You’re doing it though,” says Zeke, almost awed. “You’re out there.”





	tunnel vision

He’s running through the darkness and there’s a great bright light up ahead. It looks like freedom but it resolves into an oncoming train drawing closer. The brakes screaming on the rails, the horn reverberating through the tunnels into his quaking lungs. The dogs behind him. He can’t go forward or back, poised between this world and the next.

Months later, when it replays like a skipping record, that’s what sticks with him: hesitating, trapped, waiting to die. A single moment, frozen forever.

**

It collapses all at once, a drop of water carving out the face of a mountain, Atlantis sinking into the ocean, out of memory.

“I hope this was worth it, Diz,” his dad says, gripping him hard on the shoulder with one hand as he and their mother put on their coats to head down to the police station to learn what they can about Boo-Boo. It’s a weekend, which means they’re wasting their time and they all know it, and he feels a rush of warmth and pity for his parents, who love them enough that there’s no other option. “I’ll see you later.” He’s talking to all three of them -- Ra and Dizzee leaning on either side of the kitchen table, their mom too tight-lipped and distracted to tell them to get their asses off where people eat and Yolanda standing near the coat rack, arms crossed over her chest -- but he’s looking at Dizzee when he says it. It’s more of a threat than a promise.

“I trusted you,” his dad says before he closes the door. He’s talking to Ra-Ra, who rubs his hands over his face, bearing the weight of their dad’s disappointment, an aching load Dizzee knows all too well.

“I didn’t do this,” he says to Ra.

Ra sighs, long and slow like a funeral dirge, tracing a groove into the the table top with his thumbnail. “No offense, Diz,” he says, voice thin and exhausted, “but you’d be the worst drug dealer in the world.”

“I wasn’t even--” he stops short. In the summer, before everything -- the contracts, the tunnel, everything, he was spending over half his time in the city, working a few shifts in a musty clothing shop that gave him time to draw, crashing at the pier because it was closer and because he couldn’t tear himself away. He gave his parents part of the cash: payback for sending them into early graves.

“Yeah,” says Ra. “You never are.” He bites his lip after and looks down, waiting maybe, for something, an excuse, but Dizzee looks at him steadily, razor-thin snare at the throat. “I said I’d keep an eye on you.” He always has. That’s his job. He leaves Dizzee sitting there at the table, lost in the house he grew up in, his siblings’ doors closed to him, locked away. Less than twenty four hours ago they were kings, now they’re scattered to the corners of the earth, each facing a roaring demon standing between them and home. If home is even something he can go back to.

Alone at his desk, he picks up and puts down his pencils, closing out his epic. He draws and erases iterations of himself and Rumi, until they’re indistinguishable on the page, a gray formless shape rubbing through the paper. There’s a way to tell the story with Dizzee written out, a spectre in the wings, lost through a wormhole. His own history rewritten.

**

Boo-Boo’s set free after three days with all charges dropped, smelling like damp and fear, his clothes sweat-stiff and grimy. Dizzee hugs him so close it’s painful. His parents come down with the force of angry gods: no comics, no music, no movies, no painting, they’ll open and close the shops before and after school and sit upstairs studying their textbooks until the words are etched into their brains, no bargaining, no exceptions, take it or leave it. They eat dinner in silence, forks and knives scraping against plates.

He keeps his head down, pushes carrots around his plate; he can feel his dad watching him. After the raid on their stash a few weeks ago, after his brothers went to school, their neatly written contract on the kitchen table, his dad mused while Dizzee washed dishes: nearly half a year out of high school with nothing to show. “I have a job, Dad, we told you,” he’d said, irritated, defensive. His dad got by on music when he was Diz’s age, dark, glitzy jazz clubs in Greenwich Village and Harlem, a few peregrine years rotating through New Orleans, DC, Chicago. He thinks of Zeke shaking his head, saying, “Listen, it’s done. All of it. It’s fucking over, okay?” walking away into the dark mumbling to himself.

He dreams he runs until he’s exhausted, past the lights and the phoenix and the secret spot where he was saved until it’s completely dark. He keeps running, down deep into the earth past enormous lake-filled caverns, tropical forests grown in the darkness, waterfalls crashing until it’s silent and still. The tunnel widens and he’s out in space, suspended and helpless, fighting for air. He wakes up short of breath, blankets wrapped like a shroud.

Dizzee sits with his feet tucked under him on his bed, listening to the rhythm of his family through the walls, the rising tide of the morning: Ra hustling Boo out the door, Yolanda downstairs opening the salon, the thumping footfalls of shoes on the stairs, doors slamming motes of dust from the ceiling. He piles sweaters and long-sleeve shirts, his favorite army jacket, a couple of scarves, into a duffel coming apart at the seams on the floor. Jeans, pencils, markers, a few much-loved falling apart books.

His room seems both unchanged and enormously empty: his boxes full of markers and buttons, the flyers and posters, the bookcase listing unsteadily to one side under untidy stacks of papers and books, the window he spent days staring out of, feeling small and unsure. There’s a faint noise, a subtle shift in the air; his dad’s leaning one shoulder against the door frame, watching him. “Mind’s made up, huh,” he says. Dizzee wonders how everyone can read him so easily in a single glance yet never understand the language.

“Yeah,” he says, sitting back on his heels. He picks at the corner of the red and white checked quilt he’s slept with since he was a kid, bites his inner lip. “Can I take this?” His dad tells him to take more than one, something heavy and warm from the hall closet. “And socks.” Dizzee’s knees crack when he stands. He forgot about socks. He’s probably forgetting a lot of things.  

His dad puts both hands on his shoulders: steadying, grounding. “You got a place to go, right? Some place safe?” His dad's gaze flickers down like maybe he wasn’t planning to ask. His eyes are wet, the very finest tremor in his jaw. Dizzee swallows and nods. “And not too expensive?”

He takes a breath: slow, steady, centering. “I have a roommate.” Meeting his dad’s gaze he feels like a kid again, his dad probing through him, exposing all his secrets, his lies big and small, the things he wraps tightly inside.

“You’re my swan, Diz,” says his dad, low, when he pulls him in for a hug, warm and familiar. “Gotta spread those big wings wide.” He taps Dizzee’s back between his shoulder blades like the wings might grow any minute, unfold out into the room, wide feathered things knocking books off shelves, molting all over the place. Dizzee rests his chin on his dad’s shoulder, looks at his hands, skin dry and papery from scrubbing paint out from the creases of his palms, picking it from under his nails. He never wanted to be a swan or an alien or any of it, but it feels inevitable: like fighting the blue sky or the setting sun.

He leaves in the daytime, knocks against the glass of the shop to wave. His dad waves back, once. Later, he finds the cash, a full fifty dollars, rolled into a thick pair of socks.

**

He’d missed Thor bodily, ached with it, especially in those early uncertain days when it became clear the city was going to prosecute. He walked around worried and distracted, dreams filled with shadows and growls, hurling himself headlong into the dark. He was alone and, more than that, suddenly lonely, abruptly shifted back six steps into a skin he thought he’d shed. Things he was accustomed to ignoring -- Ra rolling his eyes or the pregnant puzzled pauses, Mork with an afro -- stuck in his lungs, growing heavy.

He spent long hours at the pier, savoring his memories until they became worn and faded, until he wasn’t sure what he’d experienced and what he’d imaged. He filled up canvases, walls, even the furniture, the clubs, with gods and aliens, lists and unsent letters pouring into the back pages of his book, working methodically forward until he met the sketches in the middle: his art and Thor colliding, heart and soul.

He started the comics frustrated because they’d never needed words before and the ones that came weren’t the right ones. He wasn’t sure how to write _i miss you_ , which looked empty and bare and pathetic once it was coughed out of his heart and onto the page. Drawing seemed to help, a shoddy, stop-gap patch on his leaky heart, until he was spending hours upon hours working on each one, turning the empty months into a vast fantasy. “You think you’re Homer?” asked his dad, but he was happy enough Diz was suddenly home more, head bent over his desk, a miracle not to be examined too closely. Ra peered over his shoulder at the comics and deemed them _pretty good, actually_. Zeke complained he looked ugly.

Now he’s writing his letters the other way: home to the Bronx, a message in a bottle across the universe. He tucks into the lumpy stained mattress wrapped up in his checkered blanket and two pairs of socks, sketches out a river and stares at it for what feels like hours, unsure how to ford it.

Thor drops down next to him, smelling like soap. He’s mostly naked and damp, prickled with gooseflesh, lips blue, teeth chattering, and he presses his cold nose against Dizzee’s neck. The bathroom is a corner behind a sheet with a retrofitted shower head that spits painful icy water in every direction, high-pitched moans coming from the rattling pipes overhead. Thor rests his chin on Dizzee’s shoulder, makes a soft hum at Rumi, tucked into one corner of the page, on his lonely rock, his own little prince. “I thought,” Dizzee takes a breath, feeling every inch exposed and soft, ripe for the kill, “that’s how life was.” The warmth suffuses through his back, anchoring.

“For everyone?” Thor traces his fingers against Dizzee’s collarbone, hands cold, breath warm on Dizzee's throat. His voice is low, tinged with the grief of hard-won freedom.

Dizzee turns his face, wanting to be held and touched. “No,” he says, choked, the nebulous ache in his joints. He’s an explorer from a distant world landing on a new one, strange and cold, carving his home into the barren landscape. When he sleeps he dreams of running and bright lights. He wakes to a darkness filled with sinister noises: rats skittering in the ceiling and the wind whistling across the pier. Shouts and footsteps behind the door, the clang of metal on metal, aliens creating their own brightly-burning, secret galaxies. He exhales some of the fear, curves himself into the warmth behind him, melting into it, protected.

**

Shao shows up at the pier on New Year’s Eve with a crate of records, a few bottles of beer, and a band-aid tin stuffed full of coke. He scrawls SHAO007 in white powder on the the beat-up door they propped on cinderblocks for a low table. Thor looks Dizzee and shrugs.The three of them ring in the new year cross-legged on the floor, drinking orange juice and doing lines until well past sunrise. Good-bye ‘78, welcome to the world 1979. Dizzee tries to keep a careful distance away from Thor, but they drift together anyway, like two magnets. He catches Shao’s gaze lingering on the space between them.

Shao talks, faster and more than Dizzee’s ever heard, about music and the money he’s making, mostly about the money, and sometimes about sacrifice and love and family. “You’re lucky,” he keeps saying to Diz and the words turn Diz’s mouth to chalk each time. He knows. There’s only once, between lines late in the night when a purple light begins to tinge the grimy windows along the ceiling, that Shao says, “And Books? How’s he doing,” eyes beseeching, the false intimacy of the coke, the wide open vulnerability Shao carries around with him all the time, his samurai sword. Shao's white-hot desperation, the ache to belong. Dizzee grinds his teeth together, runs his tongue along his teeth. His jaw hurts.

Thor gets up once to hunt around in their clothes for a pack of cigarettes Dizzee’s pretty sure they’ve already smoked. Shao watches him across the room, the lines of him, until he says to Dizzee in a low voice, “You need anything, let me know.” Dizzee looks down at his hands, because it doesn’t feel at all like need, at least not in the way Shao’s talking about.

Thor has two bent cigarettes when he sits down and he passes his palm once, sure and steady, against the small of Dizzee’s back. Dizzee’s throat closes when he thinks about the first time he came here: the empty, wide open space before they scavenged the paints and canvas and supplies, their footsteps echoing on the concrete floor, Thor kissing him, so nervous, his face, his neck, the curved bones of his hips, their shy, tentative touches. Thor rubbing his nose along Dizzee’s cheek, kneeling between his legs, his mouth on the ridge of Dizzee's pelvis. His breath wrenched out of him. He was flung so far from home, a lonely, desperate alien.

“Anything, brother,” says Shao again, voice strident and high. When Dizzee looks at Shao, he’s watching him.

“You too,” says Dizzee, wanting to take the words out of the air and make them a real, physical thing, wrapped up in a box for Shao to keep with him, some place safe, an amulet against the dark.

Dizzee wakes up in the late afternoon and stumbles outside to vomit nuclear green on the freezing cold pavement, legs giving out beneath him. Shao’s long gone, locked up in whatever gilded birdcage Annie keeps him in. Dizzee feels the absence keenly, long-lost and impotent. He kneels on his hands and knees, gagging, until he stops shaking, then crawls back into bed, trembling, needy, and despairing to press his nose against the warm juncture of Thor’s jaw, his warm, sleep-heavy body drawing the ice from Dizzee’s marrow like poison from a wound.

**

They go see King Tut at the Met, spend hours shuffling in line down Fifth in sleeting rain. A lone performer plays the saxophone, partially sheltered by a bare tree. Dizzee turns his collar up against the cold and dares to lean a damp shoulder against Thor’s. Dizzee tucks his numb fingers into his own jacket and tips his head back to squint a the sky: the clouds a flat, featureless gray like a ceiling. The homesickness rises up suddenly, the raspy quality to his dad’s voice when he’d Dizzee tell stories about the music years, the two of them tucked away like a secret while his mom put the rest of the kids to bed. Resting his head on his dad's chest, listening to the deep thud of his heart, smoky impressions of the stage, dark silhouettes dancing, the quality of the streets after rain rising out of the recesses of memory like a long-forgotten dream. Thor fishes a few quarters for the musician from his pockets.

The exhibit is crowded, shoulder to elbow descending into the gold-filled room, air thick and dank with a crush of bodies, smelling like damp wool, the high sounds of kids’ voices and wet boots slick against the floors. The burial mask is unexpectedly sad, luminous lonely eyes staring beyond Dizzee endlessly into the afterlife. Younger than Dizzee is now -- Ra’s age -- snuffed out. A kid with a destiny bigger than any one person could fathom, so far in the future as to be beyond imagination.

It feels wrong and slightly evil, the model of the tomb, pressing his nose against the glass, like meeting the gaze of a wild animal at the zoo. It’s hard not to think about what Tut might make of all this -- his afterlife’s sustenance pillaged from its resting place and transplanted halfway across the world, for no other reason than he happened to be unlucky enough to somehow survive out of his world and into Dizzee’s. When Dizzee imagines the world in three thousand years, it’s full prosaic bits of sci-fi, lifted out of the movies, the same fight against the powerful, a revolution against the empire, weighing a human heart against an atom.

He feels Thor’s hand at his neck, thumb tracing along his spine above his collar, which helps him breathe easier in the gilded tomb. “Reminds me of home,” Thor says, a half-hatched smile, and looks down, a joke with jagged, smarting edges.

They spend some time studying the Book of the Dead. Dizzee makes a few quick studies, then they head to the medieval armor and ancient Greeks to look at the murals and swords. He finds an illuminated manuscript he might use one day and hunts for a postcard of it in the gift shop, but there’s nothing, just a million gold-edged pictures of King Tut: melancholic kohl-lined eyes following Dizzee wherever he goes.

The rain’s cleared by the time they leave, a sliver of cerulean barely visible through a crack in the clouds,  the world is threatening to break apart at the seams. Thor refuses to cross Fifth Avenue above 60th, so they cut back through the mostly-deserted park, get briefly, willfully lost, and wind up by Alice and her mushrooms. Climbing up, jeans damp, sitting close by necessity. Dizzee splurges on popcorn and honey-roasted peanuts, mixes them together in the bag, the heat distributing a dusting of sugar. “You never did this?” he says at Thor’s reflective silence as he chews the salty-sweet popcorn. “My dad always did this for us.”

“Um,” says Thor. “No.” He glances back over his shoulder with a hunted expression like the trees are going to part and Park Avenue will rise up to meet them. The most typical place in the universe is vast, empty space, airless everlasting night. Dizzee became Rumi when it was clear he’d never be human enough. He imagines feeling small and weak and alone and, yeah, he might’ve ended up a god. No transformation is without cost. He doesn’t like to think about it that way, so he nudges closer across the mushroom until their knees and shoulders touch, body heat bleeding through.

**

He eats with his family and takes pains to show up on time and alert, which ends up making him late and distracted. Ra-Ra brings his Zulu girl, Tanya, slotting her neatly in where Mylene usually sits, an object of fascination for his parents. Diz’s small measure of relief is undercut by a faint longing when his parents pepper her with questions about her grades, her family, her music, her best subject, what she thinks of the meatloaf and split pea casserole, while Ra tries to intercede. Yolanda catches his eye a few times, smoothing a faint smirk into innocence. Dizzee drops his gaze to his plate.

His dad digs the Zulu vibe, lets that dominate the conversation. The easy meandering of their family dinners. Dizzee keeps quiet, avoiding the minefields of forced conversation with his brothers. Somehow they all came to a collective decision to ignore Dizzee’s living across river, which just makes it louder and brighter in the interludes, bearing down on them as it screams down the tracks. His mom makes too much food and makes a big show about there being no room in the fridge, so he’ll have to take some back, which fools no one. She touches him a lot: his shoulders and face and neck, complaining he’s getting skinny like he hasn’t heard that song and dance his entire life. He agrees to take dessert and another serving of dinner, ducks his head when she runs her hand over his hair.

In an attempt to buy goodwill, he volunteers to wash up after, scraping plates into the trash and washing plates and pans while his dad dries. The rest of them escape between one moment and the next, vanished. It’s comforting, the familiar chore he’d always hated for putting him under the laser focus of his dad. Sometimes after tense meals that resembled cross-examinations, Boo-Boo would offer to help instead, but their father always said no. “A man's rituals are his lifeblood, Boo,” his dad would say, in his mild, immovable way. When they were little, in a smaller, dingy apartment, his parents still saving up to open the shop, their dad worked as a dishwasher, the late night shift until three or four in the morning. They all shared a room then, piled on top of each other, his parents on a cordoned-off mattress in the living room. His dad would sneak in when he got home to whisper good night to each of them, running his hand over their heads. His silhouette against the sliver of light from the living room, Dizzee cracking one eye open, rubbing his cheek against his dad's open palm. He finds himself grateful for the brief private moment. The way his dad takes pains to love them individually.

He waits until he’s wiping out the sink, fingers waterlogged. “I want.” He coughs. “It wasn’t me,” he says, the words escaping him before they’re fully formed. “I wasn’t -- I’d never.” He swallows, squeezes his eyes shut briefly. It’s always when it’s important, when he’s trying to make himself understood, that words fail him. He was wired wrong, missing the beats that come to everyone else so easily. “Not with Boo,” he says, surprised at how firm it sounds.

His dad sighs, stacking glasses in the cupboard. “I know, Diz.”

“Yeah?” He bites the inside of his mouth and risks a glance at his dad, who is now looking at him.

“Yeah.” Dizzee takes a deep breath, nods. He doesn’t understand why, really, it matters so much to him, that his dad knows. That he’s reckless with himself but never them, that his heart is overfull, beating painfully against his bones, with how much he loves them. It would be easier to distance himself from it, to stop examining his life through his dad’s eye, finding himself lacking, poorly drawn.

Ra-Ra is meticulously blocking out an essay arguing that Star Wars should replace The Iliad in high school English classes. “The epic is the oldest narrative form,” he says to Dizzee; Tanya excuses herself elegantly to give them a minute. When Diz informs him he’s going to fail, he scoffs. “ _You_ graduated.” Diz shrugs. Point taken.

Dizzee shifts from foot to foot, stalling, the desire to pry Ra’s brain open and crawl inside, live in the warmth and lightning.“So.” He lets the question ask itself, but Ra-Ra’s open smile answers immediately even though he tries to shrug and be cool about it. “Yeah I bet,” says Dizzee. He laughs when Ra hits him in the shoulder, rolling his eyes. It’s like last summer or the year before that; he’s certain he’s stood here exactly before, with the same dull ache in his bicep, Ra-Ra shaking his head. Ra falls silent, air suddenly sucked out of the room. Dizzee steels himself. With Ra-Ra, it’s never one thing, it’s an avalanche, tumbling out of his mouth faster that Dizzee can keep up.

“You okay?” say Ra, scraping his thumbnail on spiral edge of his notebook. “Like really.” He keeps his eyes on his hands, but he’s really watching Dizzee: their mom’s trick. Dizzee can never look away. He nods.

“You got blankets? Socks?”

“Yeah, Ra.” He bites his inner lip, serious.

Ra-Ra takes a deep breath. “Shao says you’re okay,” he says, like it’s being scraped out of him. Dizzee nods again, voice stuck somewhere in his throat, because he knows how much that cost Ra to admit. It feels dangerous what Ra might put together with that brain of his always racing. Ra glances at him, quick, looks away, maybe finding the seam in Dizzee’s shadow painful. “You know Boo,” he says, Ra’s way: picking up some other thread midstream. “It’s like fighting with a hurricane.” Dizzee raises his eyebrows because he does know. “He’s like you.”

“I’m not a hurricane.” If anything, he's the one stuck in the eye, watching the world spin away from him, chaos. 

Ra-Ra laughs, fond, exasperated. “Like the west wind or something. You come through and we’re all lost in Oz.” All of them, just trying to get home. Ra tips his head back, serious, wide-eyed.

He’s there, right there, but he’s also ten feet away, watching the way Ra looks at him, worried. There’s a fissure somewhere behind his lungs, like he cleaved himself into Jekyll and Hyde, and each half grew its own set of arms and legs into a whole; now it’s filled up his body, walks around with his face and voice. The more he slides into Rumi’s skin, drags him out of tunnels into the light, Dizzee comes back a little fainter, the faded negative.

**

They pull down the boards over the bands of narrow windows that run down the sides of the warehouse, painstakingly taping over individual broken panes to keep out the wind. Strips of warm amber light fan across the floor in the afternoons, church-like. Holy. It’s colder, so he lives in a scarf and lined wool mittens lopped off above the palm. He gets used to painting in the daytime, in the scant hours before sunset when the light streams in, liquid gold in their little kingdom.  

Thor builds shelves for their supplies, scavenges wood planks from an abandoned lot and talks the guy at the hardware store into letting him use their saw. He comes home with an inch-wide stripe of pink sunburn across his forehead and curls of sawdust clinging to his hair. Dizzee spends long hours on the pier, knees tucked up to his chest, stuffed into two coats, woolen scarf pulled up over his nose, gloves, hats, staring out at the water. His family used to tease him for endless days of staring out at nothing, living inside his head, motionless like a doll waiting to be wound up. The beginnings of an idea pinballing around his synapses, a spark of new life in the universe. It begins all at once, out of nothing, exploding outwards, expanding. Pure chance.

Thor’s hair grows out, dry and split at the ends into a mess of nest-like knots at the base of his skull that catch on Dizzee’s fingers. Dizzee brackets Thor’s hips between his knees on a spread of yellowed newspapers and trims it straight across the back. For reasons beyond Dizzee, this makes it hang at bizarre angles, slightly shorter in front, the top poofing out instead of curling. For days he tries to fix it until it’s dangerously close to clearing the shoulders and Thor puts a moratorium on trims. He finds tiny blond hairs all over everything: clinging to his collar, floating in his coffee, embedded in the purple stripe of Rumi’s tailcoat.

Thor twists a chunk of Dizzee’s afro into a downy thorn near his right temple where it grows faster than the rest. “My real visage,” says Diz. His parents would drop dead if they knew he let a white boy near his hair with clippers. “Among other things,” says Thor, leaning to kiss him, mouth warm, smiling, his chin and jaw rough with stubble against Dizzee's lips.

He finds a barber close to home and spends half an hour casing it from across the street, shifting from foot to foot and chewing the corner of his lip before he goes in. It’s weird to sit in someone else’s shop, listen to someone else’s radio station and neighborhood gossip, the timbre of someone else’s voice above him and read someone else’s outdated fliers on the walls. He’s never been anywhere but his dad’s shop. A leaden weight sits in his stomach. He picks at seam of the chair where the leather is cracked and dry, threads of stuffing peeking out.

It ends up too short, which he hates because it makes his ears stick out, which makes him feel vain and childish. “Now we’re a matched set.” Thor presses his mouth to the smooth patch of skin beneath Dizzee’s ear, hands careful when they settle against Dizzee’s hips, dry calluses skimming delicate skin: grooves carved for him specifically.

“We already are,” says Dizzee, but he feels a little better anyway. He perches up on his elbows while Thor sleeps next to him in the middle of the day, trying to capture it for his brothers. A letter he'll never send. He traces one finger along Thor’s shoulder, marveling.

**

Thor lands on a patch of ice jumping down from a fence and the pop of tendon and muscle when his foot hits the ground is audible in the late-winter desolation. When they get home, Dizzee pulls the foot into his lap and lays two fingers against the swollen bridge where a faint purple has begun to rise, blood billowing up under the surface. His joints ache: sympathy pains. He runs a shirt under the always-freezing faucet and wraps it around around the ankle. Thor breathes out slowly, a white cloud billowing up between them.

The warehouse is frigid, barely warmer than the night air. Dizzee crawls up beside Thor carefully and presses against him with the full weight of his body, kissing him open mouthed, soft. He finds the shallow divots of Thor’s ribs with his fingers. Thor draws them together, hands spread at his scallop of his back, huddled beneath the blankets. Their bones locking together, two ribcages curving together to protect one soft heart.

He picks up shifts painting offices a dull flat white after hours. It’s quiet and soothing, cluttered cubicles and desks covered in white sheets, a tent city after a plague. He rifles through the desks a few times, looking for something weird and interesting, but instead finds bits of paper full of half-hearted attempts at lyrics, sketches, advertisements, notes for novels, and little cartoons. Creative spirits hidden away in every corner, waiting to find him. There’s something comforting in that.

When he’s working, he closes one eye and plans out pieces in white primer one layer at a time, picking out the individual colors until it rises off the wall into the world: alive, breathing, joyful. He walks home in the morning, streets empty, bodegas grates screaming as they’re cranked open, tips his head up to the sky, watches the clouds kaleidoscope.

In a used bookstore poking around some of the Met’s old exhibit catalogs he finds a dairy pack stuffed full of old pulp novels for fifty cents -- crime, sci-fi, horror, romances with lurid, emotional climaxes that Thor reads aloud to him, stretched across the mattress half dressed with one foot propped up. They stretch Dizzee’s family dinner leftovers for days when they have them, otherwise subsist on peanut butter bread and cereal.

A monstrous gray and white tomcat the size of a coyote takes up residence in a cracked plastic tub in the alley behind their building. It stalks around, hunting rats and other small, scurrying things in the dead hours of the night, yowling. Dizzee’s pretty sure Thor feeds it; sometimes it materializes out of the darkness when he opens the outer door, eyes reflecting the light like two coins, then slinks away, disappointed. They hear it in the walls, prowling through the vents, tiny battles resulting in little droplets of blood outside the door. Dizzee stuffs a paint-crusted towel and a ratty wool sweater into the tub when the temperature dips into the twenties, payment for its service.

He draws miniatures on the torn out covers from the pocket paperbacks -- renderings from his everyday life: two feet of mystery slush a rabbit hole to another world, his skin hanging out to dry between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, with the idea of stringing them together as a story, but he can’t resist tacking them up wherever he goes, on notice boards, tucked into window corners, slipping them into record sleeves when they’re thumbing through the stacks. Postcards from the yellow brick road.

One day at the writers’ bench Daze hands him one, _The Creature from Beneath_ on one side, a cut out from the paper of Koch on the other, looming over the city like Godzilla, banishing the angels from heaven. “Rumi’s calling card,” says Daze. Dizzee laughs, but he likes the idea. _We was here,_ behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs, proof of life for extraterrestrials, letting them know: this road is dark and dangerous and far from home but we’ll protect you. “You guys are pretty set up down there,” he says, voice without inflection, and Dizzee nods. Daze was his first friend out of the graffiti artists, who found him in tunnels and on walls and brought him in. Daze taps the postcard against Dizzee’s knee, pushes his glasses up his face.

“People like them,” says Dizzee, amazed, one evening at their jerk chicken place. It serves other things besides jerk chicken, fresh meat-filled turnovers and sweet rolls, but that's what they always get. There’s a platter of picked over bones shoved to the side, a dozen balled up napkins, their one endless cup of coffee. The restaurant is tiny, a handful of unsteady folding tables and one blaring television emitting a maddening high-pitched whine, but it’s warm and they eat for cheap in exchange for painting the walls and trim bright summery blues and yellows. 

“Of course they do,” says Thor. He’s flipping through back issues of expensive magazines, swollen foot propped up on Dizzee’s thigh under the table.

Dizzee slides his postcard across the table face down, their fingers touching, lingering. “Here,” he says, “your turn.”

**

He goes back to his parents’ with an old backpack to collect art and sewing supplies. Boo-Boo’s in his room now and Dizzee’s worn heart curls when Boo assures him he hasn’t changed anything. Dizzee sits on the edge of the bed, knee pressed against Boo’s. “You should make it yours,” he says. “Evolve your own planet.” Boo presses his lips together, mouth drawn in at the corners.

“I miss you, Diz,” says Boo-Boo. He tips his head against Dizzee’s shoulder, warm. When Boo was little he followed Dizzee everywhere, from room to room, down the block to the bodega, got into his papers and buttons and books, scrawled big dumb childish words over Dizzee’s drawings. He begged Dizzee to take him out bombing, promised he’d be good and quiet and fast. And he was.

“I miss you too, Boo.” Here, with Boo-Boo solid and warm next to him, the ache in Dizzee’s chest is a black hole: gaping and hungry, for the sounds, the touch, the _smell_ of him. When they were kids, their parents would pair them off for excursions: Dizzee and Boo linked hands in the front, Ra-Ra and Yolanda bringing up the rear because they could be trusted not to wander off. When he thinks of trips into the city or down to Coney Island, the stifling heat of summer, the waves crashing against his knobby knees, sand caked on his calves, he thinks of Boo’s warm, damp hand in his.

“But you’re not coming back?” asks Boo. He’s trying to look straight ahead but his gaze keeps slipping back to Dizzee.

“No, Boo,” says Diz, voice soft. If he could go back-- but when he imagines it, he would do it all the exact same way, and he’d still end up the same: sleeping in nearly everything he owns, tucking his fingers into his sleeves and wrapping Thor’s fur-lined coat around himself, wrapping Thor around himself. The further he gets from his choices, the more it seems like every path leads him here, his half-heart carved in stone long before he came along to do anything about it. The get down, their music, his brothers -- atoms colliding briefly to make something beautiful and fated, written in the DNA of the cosmos.

“I could come see you sometime. Light up Manhattan.”

“Yeah,” says Diz. “Sometime.” Alternate universes and distant futures, robots on Mars, arriving at a small shadowed planet, streaked with blue. Boo-Boo at the pier, his wide-legged stance, stubborn and sure, tilting his head to one side, reaching out to touch, gentle.  

**

He dreams of running, being chased, with his heart gouged out, abandoned beating on pavement when he cleared the fence.

“You got away,” says Dizzee, curling his fingers into Thor’s shoulder blades, the last bloody remnants of the dream fading away, crystallizing into the dark warehouse. The sound of the warning horn reverberating in his bones as he blinks away the lights. He sinks back into his own skin, muscles and bones turning to liquid in the warmth.

“I said I’d keep you safe,” says Thor into his hair, hands on his body, trailing up his thighs and back.

**

They come out of a club a few hours before sunrise to a blanket of fresh snow, fat flakes falling still, catching in their hair, melting on his cheek, his ears still ringing. They could fly home, floating safely above the city, but they walk instead, posing as human, eager to live in the world. He threads their fingers together, Thor’s palm warm against his, brave on the empty streets. The faint crystalline crunch of the snow under their feet, melting into his shoes, his toes going numb, feet painfully cold. The city feels alien, bombed out and still, people tucked away in their warm beds, holding each other close.

Their two sets of footprints chart out unknown territory, crash-landed on a desolate planet, seeking shelter. The streetlamps are haloed and buzzing, neon signs chasing, the afterimage burned into his retinas. Wind blows gusts of powdery snow across intersections in huge white waves. At one corner they wait for the crosswalk, Dizzee tucked up under Thor’s arm, submitting to a peppering of kisses across his wet cheek and forehead, Thor’s fingers skirting along the hem of his shirt, exposed. A plow going by ignores them.

At the pier there are a few groups huddled under overhangs, mostly young guys like them, giving diffident waves as they pass. The water is smooth and glassy, big flakes settling on icy sheets, catching the light from burning trash cans, throwing it back out. Their neighbor is outside his place smoking a cigarette; he seems charmed by them. It’s a warmth, a firework in his chest arching upwards, exploding, a glimmer in the dark. The revolution will come by night.

“I want to work,” says Dizzee, tilting his face to be kissed, unable to pry his hands away from skin, touching along Thor’s throat, the tendons of his neck, his hair. Dizzee walks backwards slowly; an achingly slow, awkward shuffle, pinballing along the wall, a few steps then stop, crashing into each other.

“Mm, okay.” Thor hums against his jaw, smoothing his hands down Dizzee’s sides, heavy, sure, sanding down the rough-hewn edges. Most stars are pairs, two bursts of light orbiting each other, some close enough to touch, exchange starstuff. “Go work then.”

“You go work,” says Dizzee, breathless, dumb and smitten.

“I am.” Dizzee thinks he says _oh my god_ , murmurs it into Thor’s mouth. Dizzee lets himself be pushed down into the mattress, legs spreading, Thor leaning over him, mouthing at his collarbone, his shoulders. Pulling off their clothes, shirts and jeans, underwear, sinking into the soft heavy nest of blankets. Dizzee paints Thor’s body with his mouth, the taste of him, down his chest, the flat of plane of his sternum, to his stomach, the soft skin at his waist and hips and the creases of his thighs, sweating, shaking for it.

**

Zeke walks him to the train station, stuffed in a lumpy beige turtleneck and coat, a beanie pulled low all the way to his eyebrows. He’s stewing, a palpable cloud with lightning sparks rolling around Zeke with the force of a storm: at them, at the world, at himself.  Dizzee can almost see him forming the words like one of his poems, mentally writing and rewriting what he thinks will reach Dizzee. With the two of them, things are never quite as easy as the rest. Zeke’s silence is a physical thing that envelops him like a cloud.  They duck between buildings to smoke.

“You can’t live in a dream,” says Zeke. “You can’t always trust everyone.” He sounds world weary and old. He and Zeke never quite meet in the middle, both of them too raw and tender, requiring careful tending. He imagines what being Dizzee being careful might look like to Zeke.  Zeke is never careful, not like Dizzee is, timid and afraid. Zeke is bright and bold, trusts people until they burn him, puts his heart out there for the world to see, grabs at everything that comes his way, eager and brave. It was Zeke pulling off this stunt with the rhymes that made Dizzee think: okay, maybe.

“I’m serious, Diz,” says Zeke, putting a hand on his shoulder. Dizzee holds himself still. “There’s bad shit out there.” The wise older brother. Sometimes Dizzee feels young and unformed next to Zeke, who looks out and sees his paths unfold clearly ahead of him, a distinct choice. Dizzee occasionally thinks he spies the sun on the horizon, a brief flash illuminating a murky landscape, but then it sinks away again. All he can do is heave one foot forward into the dark and trust the ground will be there.

He gives Zeke one of the book covers, colored on both sides: on one side the pier electrified by light by Dizzee and the other side Thor’s careful, even waves and silhouettes in rosy pinks and electric greens. They’re both signed, wide block letters. Zeke flips it over, one way then the other: heads and tails, a natural extension that merges the two in an optical illusion. Two halves of a whole, stumbling over each other at random, the way two people knit together instantly, healing some ancient, long forgotten wound. Digging his hands in and refusing to let go. “I saw Shao,” he says finally, tentative. Zeke’s face closes off.

“You gotta, though,” says Dizzee, voice sandpaper. “Bring him into the light.”

Zeke sighs and laughs at the same time. “You--” he says. “Like a fucking fortune cookie.” The Oracle of Delphi. The Sphinx: composed, unknowable, tucked up out of reach from the wear and tear of the world. His fragile, full heart, bared open. He thinks of the wings: bright, downy and warm, keeping everyone he loves close and safe from whatever loiters in the darkness, from indifference and rejection.

Zeke holds up the postcard. "One day I'll sell this for a million bucks," he says.

“It’s not easy,” Dizzee says.

“You’re doing it though,” says Zeke, voice quiet, almost awed. “You’re out there.” Looking at someone else in a mirror, everything reversed, picking out your own reflection.

**

He gathers up all their clothes and sheets into a rusted shopping cart and and spends a gray afternoon at the wash and dry with a sock full of change. He lies across the washing machines staring up at the ceiling, picking out the monsters in the shapes behind the erratically flickering fluorescent lights. The narrow rows of machines reach back from the street seemly never-ending, windows and walls completely papered over with posters, warnings in shaky all-caps magic marker: NO DYEING, and ominous notices. Drunks lounge in the corners, asleep, snoring; harried moms in pressed uniforms stuff machines full brightly colored children’s clothes. There’s a vending machine out of everything except Coke and orange soda and for a dollar the guy behind the counter will pour out two fingers of whiskey into a plastic cup.

A skinny old lady over six feet tall with a metal pushcart full of yellow and red tulips whispers to him at the third dryer from the mirrored day-glo sign DO NOT LEAVE MACHINE UNATTENDED is thirty minutes for a quarter. He draws a postcard of an Amazon in a rainbow robe flying across the sky with a trail of colored flowers behind her. He spends long minutes carefully placing it on the notice board next to a list of locations and times for AA meetings.

The machines leak sudsy water across the floor. He sits on a dryer, warm for what feels like the first time in weeks, filling out his everyday life with bright fantastical elements: a Rumi skeleton watching his skin spin in a dryer shaped like a womb. NO DYING behind him, surrounded by other defiant skeletons. Remake yourself, die so you can be born.

A stall next to the laundromat sells salt-packed anchovies, olives in earthen hues: withered black, purple, green, huge bunches of mint. He buys some of everything before he finishes drying, so he has to carry some of the clothes home damp to string across the warehouse into a maze of wet, heavy cotton. Their mattress tucked away in the heart. They eat olive and peanut butter sandwiches, stuff a jar full of mint and packets of sugar, pour boiling water over it. He cups his hands around a tumbler of mint tea, holds it to his lips to keep warm, thinking about the creak of the bare trees when a storm threatens. The new, crisp scent of fresh laundry mixing with the acrid smell of aerosol paints, burying his nose in Thor’s hair, rubbing their cheeks together.

They hurtle through the darkness, hands linked, fearless or maybe terrified. Sharp teeth and thorns against their faces, and the ache of something permanently lost, forgotten except in dreams. Enormous wings folding out, lifting them to safety. Abruptly coming out into the world, blinking against the sudden light, drawing back, startled, this strange, sharp place.

**

He goes home in the daytime when the rest of them are at school, to drop off his accumulation of kitchen containers and pack another load of supplies to ferry back in a worn old army backpack. It would all be easier with two people -- Thor likes to tease him for never lifting anything over thirty pounds -- but he stops the thought before it really forms. Some things are his alone. His old notebooks are tucked away behind stacks of comics and he flips through them for pieces he can use for postcards, leaning one hip against the door frame, the apartment still and quiet around him.

He pops in on his dad before he leaves, the bag stuffed to the seams with nearly as much as he weighs, digging into his shoulders. The shop is oddly quiet, the radio turned down low, some old jazz station. His dad is sweeping; Dizzee’s like him, wanting to fill his hands when he’s ill at ease. Dizzee stands in the middle of the shop, waiting.

“This roommate,” says his dad. When he pauses, Dizzee’s heart pauses too, but it feels unfinished. Dizzee lets the silence go on and on, expanding until it fills up the room. “This boy.”

“Thor,” says Dizzee. His heart expands then deflates all at once, a popped balloon. He tries his very best to meet his dad’s gaze, but his courage fails him. He looks instead at the yellowed flyers for THE GET DOWN BROTHERS WITH SHAOLIN FANTASTIC: barbecues, block parties, the shows at Les Inferno, mixed with other flyers for old summer discounts and sales, a few sketchy studies. A retrospective gallery of Dizzee’s work, meticulously saved, displayed. It’s an undoing, the crumbling dam of his emotions.

“His parents named him Thor?” says his dad, raising his eyebrows. Six months ago the the faint acid in his tone would’ve had Dizzee tightening shoulders, grinding his teeth. Now he almost smiles, looks down when he drags his toe against the linoleum where it’s warped, a fine crack in the floor, the wearying effect of age and foot traffic.

“Um, no,” he says, a huff of laughter chasing it.

His dad nods, slowly, another piece of a puzzle Dizzee can’t quite make out slotting into place. “Sit,” says his dad in his take-no-shit tone. Dizzee nearly drops his ass directly on the floor before he catches his dad’s nodding to one of the stools. Diz takes his seat, shouldering off the backpack to the side, and his dad spins him around until he’s looking at himself, at both of them in the mirror.

“It pains me,” says his dad, letting it hang there between them, salt at the back of Dizzee’s throat, an itch at the bridge of his nose, before he continues, “to have my oldest child walking around like this.” He glides his hand over the uneven edges of Dizzee’s hair, catching the errant flyaway curls peeking up at the edges, before smoothing down his neck. “But I suppose you’re old enough now.” He studies Dizzee in the mirror like he can see through him, not just Dizzee, but Rumi too, two faces superimposed.

**

Tiny pink and violet flowers bloom in the cracks along the pier: delicate things sprouting up in harsh, inhospitable places, growing up toward the light. The first warm day of the year they walk out to the very edge, wind whipping their faces, the sun a weak milky yellow. Dizzee lies down with his back on the warm concrete, soaking up the sun on his skin. When the wind blows, it’s still bitterly cold, icy hooks in his bones.

There are people outside, the city waking up, sloughing off the winter debris, the snow and trash and worn wool. Poking up from the frozen ground to check that it’s safe. He’ll go home tomorrow, his family’s annual Easter feast a holdover from his mom’s baptist youth, enough food to feed them for a week. A family of ducks with downy ducklings floats on the river, maybe lost, home too early, breaking out of long-worn patterns. Fragile things worth protecting.

He presses his shoulder, sometimes his forehead, against Thor’s thigh, loops the fingers of one hand over his knee, catching his nails on the seam of his jeans. Warm, alive and human beneath his hand. Red explodes behind his eyelids, galaxies dying and being born. Atoms colliding aimlessly, fusing, new life every instant.

 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm honestly so sorry about this. comments, thoughts, criticisms, screaming abt all the ways i'm wrong about dizzee welcome. [goldenfiligree](http://goldenfiligree.tumblr.com/) @ tumblr if you wanna yell at me about my children or shame me about being a person that follows resident weird teen jaden smith on twitter. reblog fic [here.](http://goldenfiligree.tumblr.com/post/160485214293/tunnel-vision-romancandles-the-get-down-tv)


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